digital digs

neuroscience, posthuman pedagogy, and the "rhetorical mind"

Thanksgiving break is a good opportunity to catch up on some podcasts and write blog posts with immodest titles. So I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's "In our time" panel discussion on neuroscience. Though many histories might be written, the panelists suggested that neuroscience really only emerges in the mid-nineties with the development of technologies like fMRI, which allows for the mapping of brain activity. The central point the panelists make is simply that we have discovered that the "conscious" mind does very little. Generally speaking the brain is massively networked, so the parts are all interdependent, but if you pin down these panelists, they say the conscious mind is responsible for "planning, organizing, and memory."

So, for example, let's say you were going to decide between going to the gym and writing a blog post. The conscious mind wouldn't "make" the decision, but once it became aware of the decision, it would be responsible for the planning. That is, if I'm going to the gym then I know I need to get my gym clothes, update my podcasts, find my car keys, etc. 

The panelists offered several examples of how parts of the brain function despite the apparent confusion of consciousness. An optical illusion may make two identical objects appear different sizes b/c of the background against which they are placed, but the body is able to grasp either object equally well and is not fooled by the illusion. Or the famous "gorilla illusion" where one is asked to watch a basketball team and count the passes made by players in the white uniforms. At the end of the video, one can say quite accurately how many passes were made, then one is asked: "Did you see the gorilla that walked across the court and waved to you?" The answer is no, even though when the video is reshown the gorilla is obviously there. The eyes pick up the image but the conscious mind never sees it.

By now I think all this kind of business is getting to be familiar to us, even though we have only begun to really study the brain. The question is, at least from our disciplinary perspective,  what does this imply for the work we do?

the long tail of research citations

Picked this up from the WPA listserv: a recent article from the Boston Globe cites research that indicates that contemporary scholarly work cites a fewer range of sources than work in the past.

James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet's influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost - the opposite of the Internet's promise.

"Winners are inadvertently picked," says Evans. "It drives out diversity."

I haven't read the Science article (subscription required--talking about ignoring the "internet's promise"!). And the Boston Globe article indicates that there are others with research that counters Evans' claims. So in short, no one knows. However I think there are other forces at play here, one of which is mentioned above.

There has been an explosion of publication, fueled largely by increased pressures to publish at institutions of all varieties. So if there is 3X, 5X, 10X the amount of research being published annually in my field. It quickly becomes difficult to read even narrowly in my specialty, let alone browse through related fields. The network allows this information to be published but then serves to create the long tail effect as we make choices as readers.

That means that essentially 80% of the article reading events in a field will be of the top 20% of the available articles. So let's say that over a certain period of time 100 articles are published. Let's hypothesize that there are 1000 scholars in the field and that they will read 25 of these articles during this period. That's 25000 article readings. 20000 of those readings will be of 20 articles. The remaining 80 articles will be read a total of 5000 times, with a long tail were the last 30 or 40 articles are read only a handful of times.

Now let's say you have 1000 articles instead of 100 but still only 25000 readings. Now you have 20000 readings of 200 articles in the "head" but you have to look closer because 20% of those articles are getting 80% of the readings within the head. So 40 articles are getting 16000 readings, while the remaining 160 are getting 4000 readings.

So in short, it would appear that the long tail effect, if it works strictly by mathematical formula, could work to have this narrowing effect. But it isn't really the long tail that is at work here so much as the brutal forces of an attention economy. The long tail business model assumes that through the network you can reach a larger market. That is the number of available readers should expand with the networking of yoru product.

So let's change the example.

Let's say that in the print world only 1000 interested scholars would have access to your research and the limits of the print economy mean that only 100 articles can be published. That's the first example I gave above. Now let's say that in the online world we can publish 1000 articles (again as above) but this time the increased access of the Internet means there are 50,000 possible readers. (You may scoff at this, but we know more people than this are teaching FYC at this moment--are they not all potential readers of rhet/comp scholarship?.) Suddenly we can say 900 articles see the light of day that would never have been published (or possibly even attempted) under the old print economy and tens of thousands of new readers have access to them.

Now it's quite likely that 99% of those 50,000 readers will never write an article that cites your work. Surprisingly, that's the way it tends to work with most writing. Many people read Time magazine; few people cite it in their research. Still I wouldn't mind being asked to write an article for Time, would you? That's not to say that citations can't be one useful measure of the value of academic work. But it might mean that if more and more academics are being asked to publish more and more, it might make sense for us to think about valuing writing to broader audiences.

In the interim, if you feel like breaking this long tail curve, feel free to be the first to cite this blog post.

not ready for spime-time pedagogy

I'm teaching Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things right now and thus thinking of his neologism, the spime. Spimes are Sterling's vision for the next generation of technology and draw their name from their unique ability to be precisely tracked in space and time. As Sterling suggests in his book (and here in a 2004 Wired article), we are already beginning to see spimes: objects that are linked to vast databases of information about them. He gives the example of how Amazon treats books. And I was thinking the other day of how I was in the supermarket trying to find an environmentally sound cleaning product. I was staring skeptically at Clorox's new line of green cleaning supplies. So I pulled out my iPhone and did an internet search. I was able to determine that these products were relatively good. So the product is there before me and the information is out there. The spime begins with linking those two. In addition, the spime also tracks its own singular history. That is, this particular bottle and its contents: where did they originate, where have they traveled, and how will they be disposed. Sterling suggests this kind of information will be significant in the necessary green revolution everyone speaks of.

But Sterling makes another interesting observation that appears tangential, but I believe is significant. In the Wired article he notes:

In July, Mexico's attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him, a bold bid to fight government corruption. Of course, it's his brain that makes him smart. It's the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time.

This reminded me of Baudrillard's arguments about the power of being an object, a somewhat counter-intuitive argument when we generally think of agency as attributable to subjects not objects. If we are indeed moving into a cultural period where we will begin to see intelligence, information, and power as emerging from objects or networks of objects, then I believe this has significance for how we understand our discipline (and I realize that in the scope of this revolution, this is a small corner, but it's my corner).

Is there an education market bubble?

This is somewhat a follow-up to my previous meandering post about Declining by Degrees, the PBS documentary about higher education. At the end of that post I wrote myself into this question, and not being an economist, it's a genuine question.

To reiterate briefly, one of the important points made in the documentary was that in the 80s we began to say that getting a college degree would mean earning $1 million more over a lifetime. In adopting this perspective we began to move from thinking of higher education as a general social good (to be supported largely by the state) to a private good, an investment in one's personal human capital. Much like a house, you invest and borrow money with the idea that you are making an investment that will pay off. Not long ago this was especially true, and we all know the end of that story.

But here's the thing I wonder. When 25% of adult Americans had four-year degrees, maybe on average they earned $25K more per year than the other 75% (though you'd also wonder what the median was). But what happens if 35-40% of Americans have four-year degrees, are they still going to out earn the other 60-65% by the same margin? And if they do, will it make as much of a difference?

Then factor into that all the people getting undergraduate degrees in China and India now.

We should all know this. 100 years ago, it was unusual to have a HS diploma. It was a degree that had value. It still does have some value, but not much. I don't know if a undergrad degree will ever become the equivalent of a HS diploma, but a two-year degree might. And a four-year degree will be worth relatively less and an increasing number of people will be headed to grad school, which in turn will devalue that degree. When every public school teacher in NYS has a masters degree, what does that do to the value of the degree?

My point is that you need more education just to stay in place. You can't invest $20K in college and borrow another $20K with the idea that a college education is going to buy you a step up into the next economic class. Yes, it may be the case that our new economy will require a better-educated workforce. It used to be the case that you could be a middle-class factory worker without tertiary education. That's disappearing. Now you need the college degree to afford the exact same house that factory worker lived in. Except now you also have massive student debt.

So can we really continue to say that a college education is a private gain? Or do we have to recognize that it is increasingly a social necessity, a cornerstone to our national economic security? Once upon a time we made K-12 education compulsory. I don't think we can/should do that for tertiary education but I think we need to consider funding higher education in a way that doesn't begin with the premise that its an investment that is going to pay off on a personal level. There is a big payoff but it is in strengthening the overall education of our workforce, not in the relative strengthening of one individual's earning power as compared to her neighbors.

You aren't going to be able to flip your degree the way people used to flip houses.

declining by degrees

Watching this PBS documentary, Declining by Degrees. The college has been showing it on campus, but I haven't had a chance to get to it, so I got it through Netflix. It tells a story about higher education that I think is familiar to faculty. There is a growing sense that higher education is struggling to meet the needs of students. As we know the problems are multiple and complex. I can't get into all of it in a blog post, but I wanted to talk about it from the specific perspective of the faculty's role.

So the familiar criticisms of faculty are:

• We aren't especially interested in teaching. We are primarily tenured, promoted, and otherwise rewarded for our research. So perhaps it is understandable we put our efforts there.
• We aren't particularly trained as teachers. Not so true for rhet/comp folks, but certainly there are disciplines where pedagogy is not part of a graduate education. See the point above. We are trained and hired for research. Maybe that should change but I don't know that faculty can change it.
• We don't hold students to a high enough standard. There is perhaps an unspoken contract that says if I don't bother you then you don't bother me. That's a problem. And that's the one I want to talk about here b/c I was really thinking about this while watching the video.

So here's the thing. Anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student gets an A. Alternately, anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student fails. I can set a standard for what I think should be 200-level work or 400-level work and so on. Having taught at several institutions, I can tell you that those standards are different from one institution to another.

Why? Obviously it has something to do with the level of preparation/ability of the students coming into the class. For example, Gregory Ulmer has this great textbook called Internet Invention. It is marketed as a first-year composition text. One year I used it in a 300-level class at Cortland, the students found it so challenging that they cursed me out over the text in their written comments on the course evaluation form. It was a rough semester.

Could I teach them this text? Of course. Well, part of it maybe. We would have to move quite slowly. It would probably be a rather frustrating experience for the students as well, being continually confronted with a text they are unable to read. And I don't mean to pick on Ulmer here. I think it's a great text. And there are plenty of other texts I could name.

As a teacher, you realize you have to meet the students where they are. Certainly every class has students at a variety of levels but you have to design a course that hopefully is accessible to any reasonably determined student while providing opportunities for challenging the best students.

online learning, writing, and student engagement

A new report was issued this week from the National Survey of Student Engagement. You can read the full report at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.  Part of the report deals with online learning, where the survey concludes

Controlling for student and institutional characteristics, the percent of first year courses primarily delivered online was positively related to active and collaborative learning. Though this result seems counterintuitive, the online setting may offer more opportunities for collaboration and faculty who teach online courses may be more intentional about fostering active learning experiences, such as asking questions or participating in discussions. For both first-year students and seniors, the percent of courses delivered primarily online was significantly related to level of academic challenge. Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains. This suggests that integrating technology-enhanced courses into the curriculum for all students might have some salutary benefits. On the other hand, it is also possible that faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

I'm not sure why this is "counterintuitive." Actually, I suppose I do know where that comes from--the idea that students and teachers cannot make real connections without face-to-face contact. I do think it is interesting how the report notes two possible reasons for this outcome:

• Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains

or

• faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

It's an interesting interpretive problem. I would suggest that both could be true. That is, (some) faculty who are inclined to provide engaging experiences for students turn to online environments because those environments offer affordances that stimulate intellectual challenge and educational gain. Now asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist. Instead, it's one of those things we always suspect of the "other guy." Still, this would seem to indicate that we can still do more--institutionally and as professions--to reach out to faculty about the possibilities of engaging students and the potential of the online option, at least as a component in classes.

In my view, this connects with another important finding in this report on writing.

what first-year writing can do for you...

The meta-conversation of the WPA listserv is disciplinary identity. It is not surprising that the expanding field of rhetoric/composition-cum-writing studies (or whatever) struggles with identity. 30 years ago or more, it was maybe understandable that rhet/comp functioned as analogous to other specializations in English (e.g. Victorian literature), even if was maybe not as well-regarded. Today, one might either view rhet/comp as a field separate from English (which would now be literary studies) or as a general field of study with its own specializations (comparable to the field of American literature or British literature). I won't get into that today, but either way, this changes the relationship of the first-year writing course to the broader field.

On the one had, you could look at first-year composition and say that it is the cornerstone of our discipline. FYC programs are what give many of us jobs. It is by far the most commonly taught writing course in higher education. It is argubaly where we came from (unless you want to say we came from Aristotle or something as rhetoricians).

On the other hand, you could say FYC is the weakest link in our discipline. It is the course/problem that was handed to us, predefined. If you look at the growing number of professional or technical undergraduate majors or masters programs or at doctoral programs in our field, I think you get a far better sense of how our discipline understands its paradigms, its methods, and its objects of study. One thing that is immediately implicit in all these programs is the obvious fact that one cannot learn "to write" by completing an FYC program. And yet, that's what FYC was constructed to do in the 19th-century: to teach students to write. And that's the continual complaint we get from colleagues, adminstrators, and the rest: students who have taken FYC still don't know how to write.

But that doesn't mean that FYC should be abolished! It means that appropriate expectations need to be established. Think of it this way...

scenes from America's fourth republic classroom

On Salon, Michael Lind offers a historical perspective on the dawning of America's fourth republic.The first goes from Washington to the Civil War. The second then up to the Depression. And the third until 2004 (read the article, he explains). Basically they are all about 70 odd years long. Lind suggests each period begins with the centralization of government power and ends with a swing back partially in the other direction. Think of the difference of FDR-Johnson vs. Nixon-Bush. Lind offers an industrial-economic pattern behind these shifts that is fairly recognizable. The shift to steam power and railroads in the mid-19th century. The shift to electricity and internal combustion in the 1930s. And now? A green economy? Maybe.

Lind writes:

It remains to be seen what energy sources -- nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? -- and what technologies -- nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech-- will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Not surprisingly I am less derisive of the "information economy" than Lind. I don't know how Lind imagines that the nanotechnologies industry will operate outside of an information economy. Yes. Somewhere there will need to be nanotechnology factories. But that's not going to work like the automobile industry. If energy prices rise this may create some advantage for local/national production because of the costs of transporation on a global scale, but I wouldn't really count on that, b/c the raw materials for automobiles, for example, will still need to be transported globally anyway. On the other hand, one advantage of the green economy is that it requires a necessary local element. The windmills need to be where the wind is.

Blogging teleology

Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks. Some are more time intensive, others less.

I was talking FTF with Derek about this a couple days ago and we both said presented with the question of whether we imagined we'd be blogging in 10 or 20 years that the answer was "of course not." One of the things Sifry's 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports on is the changing nature of what blogging is. So even if we were doing something that we still called "blogging," it wouldn't be this.

So where is all this leading? Whatever this is.  I suppose I started blogging to investigate this question. But in some ways it is a broader question. Why write? It doesn't surprise me that the vast, vast majority of blogs are started but quickly go silent or are rarely updated with no sense of rhythm or exigency. Writing is hard. Yes the blog gives the average person the technical ability to compose and publish texts. My sneakers give me the techncial ability to run a marathon too. And though I jog on a near daily basis, I'm not running any marathons.

Blogging is an endurance event as well. It's not about the individual post. It's about doing it on a regular basis and getting back to it when your habit fails. Actually for me it is a little more like meditation than jogging in this respect. I'm always getting back to meditation and getting back to blogging.

That might suggest that there is some objective, or if not an objective at least a trajectory carved out through the practice of regular blogging. I imagine one can be interpreted from this blog or any other. However, not surprisngly, I don't see this as about telos. I'm not trying to get anywhere (sorry). Instead it is the regular practice of writing that interests me--in all of its myriad components: an engagement with rhetoric and composition that can only come through writing itself.

So "blogging" may change and I may stop blogging someday. I am sure I will. But I will always be doing this.

rhetoric of a new America

Certainly much talk about the historic election results. On CNN, one of the Republican commentators referred to his own party as a "Southern party," so much talk about they need to do. Also conversation about whether the Dem landslide means the nation has moved leftward. Predictably all the right-wingers who were decrying Obama as the "most liberal" member of the senate, even socialist, are now saying that he won b/c he adopted traditionally Republican values: tax cuts, etc. Also similar talk that Dems winning in Congress are also more centrist, though certainly that was not what was being said about them a week ago!

Who can believe any of this self-serving analysis?

This is what I see that's interesting, though predictable, in CNN's exit polls. Nationally, whites voted 55-43 for McCain, so non-whites won this election for Obama. Even more specifically, whites over 30 voted approx. 57-41 for McCain, while whites under 30 voted 54-44 for Obama. Some how I doubt that there's ever been a presidential election where the clear choice of whites over 30 was not elected. And not only was not elected but lost by a significant margin.

The exit polls reproduce the divides of the elections of recent memory remain intact. White, less educated, Christian, older, rural men and women make the vast majority of Republican voters. Of these, education is probably the least determining fact. That is if a voter has all the other characteristics, s/he's voting republican for the most part, regardless of education (though those with postgrad education vote Dem). On the flipside, urban, non-white, less religious or non-Christian, younger voters are the Dems. it would seem that the primary difference is that there are now more of these kinds of voters in a larger number of states (like VA, NC, FL, CO). But that doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain Iowa, for example.

The big question now might be whether or not this election means that we have moved to the left as a nation. Were the right-wing pundits correct last week when they were saying how liberal the Dems are or are they correct today when they are saying that the Dems won by masquerading as or turning into Reps?

Or maybe, in our most pollyanna moment, we imagine moving beyond binary politics.

As I've written earlier, I don't believe that democray is a rational process. Politics are affective. Trying to deduce a rational interpretation that says what an election "means," to assume that a rational message is sent from voters, is misleading. And this is not in anyway a slam against American voters. It is instead a position on what human behavior is like, especially on such a scale. I include myself in this. I cannot imagine any realistic conditions under which I would vote differently. Is it rational of me to say there is absolutely nothing one candidate could have done or said to persuade me? I don't think so.

But rationality is over-rated. It's a good faith but ultimately insufficient attempt to explain agency. And the left-right binary is just another part of that Cartesian mapping of political consciousness. Not that such matters are likely to drift into the mainstream any time soon, but I think that if you want to understand the new America, you'll have to move to a post-Cartesian, post-rational mapping of the political subject.